My Career

My working life has been spent conserving wildlife as a biologist for government agencies, academic institutions and non profit conservation groups. My career began as a regional game biologist in Georgia where I led projects on white tailed deer population management and studies of black bears in the Okeefenochee Swamp. In 1982 I joined the NJ Endangered Species Program. Over the next 25 years I spearheaded research and management projects on shorebirds, colonial water birds, migrate songbirds and raptors and directed work on many other bird, reptile and invertebrate species.

Beginning in 1982, I led Bald Eagle restoration in New Jersey, successfully lifting their numbers from 1 nest to over 50 today. As Chief for the last 16 years,I directed the Endangered Species Program for the NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife — supervising 25 biologists and staff, 12 or more seasonal technicians, and coordinating projects covering over 200 species. I initiated a number of conservation planning projects including the development of a statewide mapping system of endangered wildlife habitat called the Landscape Map.

(Read More: Landscape Project Booklet)

This groundbreaking GIS-based effort encouraged state officials to expand the protection of state-listed endangered species habitat with new state rules that approximated the Federal endangered species act. I helped write the new rules and am currently writing the handbook that will be used by landowners, consultants and citizens to develop habitat conservation plans — a new and exciting process for blending local planning of open space and smart growth development.

For the last ten years I focused my attention on the protection of migratory shorebirds on the Delware Bay. The decline of the Horseshoe crab population on Delaware Bay, and subsequent loss of crab eggs – the main food resource for migrant shorebirds – has caused the rapid decline of the red knot, and other Arctic-breeding shorebirds that migrate up to 10,000 miles to the southern tip of South America and back again. For most of those ten years I have led a group of scientists from around the world to study these shorebirds throughout the western hemisphere. I have lead research expeditions to the Canadian arctic, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Delaware Bay, Virginia, Florida gulf coast, Chile and Argentina.

(Read More: Shorebird Project and Blog)

In the late 1986 I started a project on monitoring the fall raptor and passerine migration through the NJ Coast that eventually led to my Ph.D dissertation on migrant raptor habitat selection. This work has led to a number of professional papers as well as two masters degrees on the migration and the influences of habitat and habitat loss. My work eventually justified regulatory action to protect habitat in the lower 10 km of the Cape May peninsula. I initiated the Stopover Project which helped create a new incentives and methods to manage backyards on the peninsula for migrant birds. I was also a principal investigator on a project that defined the extent and habitat of the passerine migrating throughout the mid-Atlantic coast.